72 replies to this topic

[MagitekAngel]

I have given WiiMednafen some time, and I'm quite happy with it! Some of you were complaining about the UI - the way you guys were talking, I thought I was in for a command line or something! As it stands, I like the interface. Sure, maybe not as pretty as the GX emulators, but it's simple, uncluttered, easier to navigate, and it works.

As for the actual emulation, I think the Genesis emulation is an improvement over Genesis Plus GX. The NES is a-ok as well, but FCE GX is already perfect enough for me, so I'm not worried. The GBC emulation is better, but the GBA emulation is comparable in terms of slowdown to GX, so a bit of a letdown there. Still, however, there is less latency to go around, so I prefer WiiMednafen for Game Boy games of all shapes and sizes now.

The Virtual Boy emulation is a nice addition, runs perfectly, and has plenty of features and color filters. Very nice! Neo Geo Pocket emulation is also great, I've got the whole library on my Wii now (lots of fighting games!). The PCE/TG-16 emulation, on the other hand, appears to need work, as while the games that run are fine, many won't even boot. I'll stick to HuGo for now.

All in all, a very nice combo emulator, and I'm very interested in seeing where future updates lead.

Edited by MagitekAngel, Wed Feb 8, 2012 9:34 PM.

[MagitekAngel]

Guess I was a bit hasty in the last post. Some of the TG-16 roms I was trying to get running before were bad dumps, which is why they didn't boot. Duh. I can go ahead and say now Mednafen is easily the best TG-16 solution on Wii.

[Nerf Herder73]

MagitekAngel, on Thu Feb 9, 2012 10:37 AM, said:

Guess I was a bit hasty in the last post. Some of the TG-16 roms I was trying to get running before were bad dumps, which is why they didn't boot. Duh. I can go ahead and say now Mednafen is easily the best TG-16 solution on Wii.

As for TG-16/PCE emulation, I agree! I've been very pleased with the ease that I can play CD-ROMs (with full audio). I ran into the same issue with the dump quality. In my experience with WiiMednafen, it seems to be very good with most of the systems that hadn't been emulated on Wii before. I'm not yet totally sold on the systems that have been covered in other emulators. The exceptions being WiiHandy and WiirtualBoy. Still early days for this effort though.

[philyso]

MagitekAngel, on Wed Feb 8, 2012 9:33 PM, said:

As for the actual emulation, I think the Genesis emulation is an improvement over Genesis Plus GX.

Well, that's surprising considering Mednafen code is based on an older Genesis Plus version.
Out of curiosity, what do you feel as an improvement ?
I never tried Mednafen Wii but Genesis Plus GX so far is the most accurate and compatible Genesis emulator I've ever used (even on PC), my wii is hooked to a CRT and with default settings, I can barely see and hear any differences with my old Genny running aside, and it has been running every ROM I threw in (even the most exotic ones) I threw in ...

Edited by philyso, Sat Feb 11, 2012 12:17 PM.

[MagitekAngel]

Some ROMS run for me with graphical glitches in Genesis Plus GX - ie. Sonic 2 has a flashing vertical bar on the left edge of the screen. I haven't noticed these problems in WiiMednafen.
The colours also look more like they should in WiiMednafen - after fiddling with the settings I could never get them quite as bright in GX. The sound seems closer for me too.

But to be totally honest, it's probably just my personal preference. They are both very good emulators.

[NinjaWarrior]

I need to get another Wii for this...

I don't really know if it going to brick a Wii with an update by Nintendo

[HatNJ]

If you follow the directions on Wiibrew.org you should be fine Nintendo hasn't updated in close to a year (Latest 4.3) and the NEW Wii's with no Gamecube or Gamecube controller support may make it harder for homebrew Unsure of this tho.

[NinjaWarrior]

I'm watching this on youtube..

[MagitekAngel]

It's been well over a year since Nintendo's last update - I think it was September 2010 that 4.3 came out. I've never hacked a device in my life and this was pretty straightforward. Didn't damage my Wii in the least - I can still enjoy Skyward Sword, the Wii Shop Channel and all that. I went the Smash Stack route - Nintendo will likely never find a way to block that one.

In the event Nintendo does update again - and they might - you can refuse the update. If you have to for the purposes of playing a new release (Xenoblade, anyone?), likely the worst that will happen is the update will delete your Homebrew Channel, and maybe BootMii. No big - if you can't put them back on right away, Twiizers will probably have another exploit fairly quickly. From what I've read bricking pretty much only happens if you muck about with unauthorized patches or screw with the IOSes.

Edited by MagitekAngel, Sat Feb 11, 2012 11:40 PM.

[NinjaWarrior]

How is WiiMednafen??

Is it easy to setup??

Edited by NinjaWarrior, Sun Feb 12, 2012 12:01 AM.

[philyso]

I finally had the chance to test Wii-Mednafen and it's actually a very good emulator, despite the limited interface. PCE emulation is years beyond what we got before, but honestly, I am a huge Genesis fan and I cannot let say Mednafen is an improvement compared to Genesis Plus GX, it's actually the opposite for me :-)

Games with major graphical glitches: Aladdin, Out Runners, Double Clutch
Games not working or freezing: James Pond 3, Dracula, Fatal Rewind, Virtua Racing, a few unlicensed games

Off course, that's not much but there might be others, whereas I more or less tested the whole Genesis romset with Genesis Plus GX to get a full set of screenshots, and never encountered a single glitch or non-working game !

Sound emulation is good but not as accurate as Genesis Plus GX. Actually, it's sounds more like Gens while Genesis Plus GX is closer to Kega in term of accuracy. That's said, some people always prefered the sound of Gens even if it's not correct. Examples of a few games that notably sound wrong in Mednafen exactly like in Gens are Scoobi-Doo, Flashback (BGM 3 in sound test) or Comix Zone (many BGM in sound test) or have wrong sound effects (Alisia Dragoon, Beavis & Butthead, etc).

MagitekAngel, on Sat Feb 11, 2012 1:19 PM, said:

Some ROMS run for me with graphical glitches in Genesis Plus GX - ie. Sonic 2 has a flashing vertical bar on the left edge of the screen. I haven't noticed these problems in WiiMednafen.

This colored vertical bar is actually part of horizontal borders, which exist on real genesis as well, though most emulators don't bother rendering it so most people forgot it was even there. It can be disable in the video settings I think. I use a 4:3 CRT myself so it's barely visible.

Quote

The colours also look more like they should in WiiMednafen - after fiddling with the settings I could never get them quite as bright in GX.

I barely noticed any difference personally, Mednafen might be a little brighter though but it's not correct: I have my Wii and my Genesis running on the same TV on different inputs, and I can confirm Genesis Plus GX palette is a better match.

Quote

But to be totally honest, it's probably just my personal preference. They are both very good emulators.

Yeah, I agree this is always a matter of preference and I can undertsand people preferring to have all emulators in one too. That's said, I base my experience on facts and testing, not general impression which I think can be pretty much biased, and I am convinced Genesis Plus GX is a better Genesis emulator overall.

Edited by philyso, Sun Feb 12, 2012 2:33 PM.

[philyso]

Actually, after some more testing, it seems like I was wrong: both emus seem to be using the exact same color palette as I could not find any differences while testing both of them against the real machine, using "original" mode in genplus and "double-strike" mode in wii-mednafen. There might be some differences when using other video mode but it's very hard to tell by simply switching from an emulator to the other, and I doubt it since it's very likely an "hardware" thing.

Overall, mind the few inaccuracies, it's still a very solid emulator and it has some specific advantages like per-game controller configuration, fast-forward and rewind feature (not working for genesis sadly).

Edited by philyso, Sun Feb 12, 2012 3:27 PM.

[NinjaWarrior]

When is WiiMednafen going to have SNES support??

[cparsley]

I can tell you I forgot to read before allowing the Wii to update itself after finally getting it connected to the Internet after awhile, the new 4.3 downloaded and removed the Homebrew channel from the Wii. The wierd thing is that it did not remove the files from the SD on the account. After running a few disc games thru it to make sure it was still fine, used the letterbomb to put it right back on the Homebrew path.

In addition to the Nes/SNES emulators on the SD card (full GoodROM set on the SNES, choice on the NES side), also have the Super Star Fighter (timed shoot em up), Open TTD and The Wii Music game based off the old music game before GH came out and took over controller based music games. (not too shabby on a 2GB SD card)

[donssword]

For those of you running into crashing issues in the app menus with fceugc (NES), snex9x-gx (SNES) and vba-wii (GBA,GBC,GB) if you install the specific Channels for these apps they will bypass the crash caused by the network check. You can also mod the XML file and remove the network check direct from the launch sequence with any text editor.

WiiMednafen is certainlky neat, but the other apps have much better interfaces.

[Nerf Herder73]

donssword, on Thu Mar 8, 2012 9:26 PM, said:

For those of you running into crashing issues in the app menus with fceugc (NES), snex9x-gx (SNES) and vba-wii (GBA,GBC,GB) if you install the specific Channels for these apps they will bypass the crash caused by the network check. You can also mod the XML file and remove the network check direct from the launch sequence with any text editor.

Heck, didn't they fix that mess in the new HBC 1.1.0 update?

[donssword]

Nerf Herder73, on Fri Mar 9, 2012 1:28 AM, said:

Heck, didn't they fix that mess in the new HBC 1.1.0 update?

Probably. I noted that the network connection icon doesn't flash as long after launch--which to me indicates that it is quickly resolving network connection issues.

I threw in my comment for two reasons:

• I run hot and cold on Mednefen--I like that it runs just about anything you throw at it, but I really prefer the other emulator's interfaces, and I really like having those cool channels for the emus at the root level (biy I wish they would do Stella 2600 and Genesis Channel launchers).
  
• I am constantly surprised by folks who have not upgraded the Wii System or Homebrew when the updates are available. The leaders of the Homebrew community are a tight bunch, and they do a good job of staying on top of things, but many people seem to like to get things running on their hardware and then they get too scared to touch it again. I just want to remind people that for most problems they run into, a fix is usually a Google away.

[Jinks]

So i have the latest ver of wii. update. red smb wii. do i have to buy a game to get the homwbrew channel??

[Jinks]

Also harddrive to run games or only run on card?

[donssword]

1) Use LetterBomb to install HBC: http://please.hackmii.com/

2) For LetterBomb and EMU games grab a fast SDHC card of about 16GB. Check WiiBrew.org for a list of compatible cards--if you don't get a compatible card, it won't work. HBC has almost all the installers you will need.

To be clear, do the following things in order:
1) Buy the biggest fastest compatible SDHC card you can afford listed on WiiBrew.org.
2) Use LetterBomb to mod your Wii.
3) Install the HomeBrew Channel (HBC) on your Wii.
4) Install your emulators of choice, likley via HBC.
5) Copy your old school ROMs to your SDHC.
6) Do not pirate Wii games. If you like the Wii, and you like the games, buy them. When you pirate games from a current console/platform, you are telling Developers and Publishers you don't want them to make you new games.

[Rex Dart]

Eh, I would install the roms on a hard drive since you'll likely have one anyways for ISOs.

[donssword]

Rex Dart, on Mon Apr 9, 2012 1:40 PM, said:

Eh, I would install the roms on a hard drive since you'll likely have one anyways for ISOs.

IMHO SDHC is cheaper, especially over the long term. No moving parts, no external power requirements, lower failure rate.

And most people are not going to be running ISOs unless they are trying to emulate PS1 games or are pirating Wii games. Piracy = Bad.

[Rex Dart]

donssword, on Mon Apr 9, 2012 6:12 PM, said:

Rex Dart, on Mon Apr 9, 2012 1:40 PM, said:

Eh, I would install the roms on a hard drive since you'll likely have one anyways for ISOs.

IMHO SDHC is cheaper, especially over the long term. No moving parts, no external power requirements, lower failure rate.

And most people are not going to be running ISOs unless they are trying to emulate PS1 games or are pirating Wii games. Piracy = Bad.

IMHO HDDs hold more.
And there's nothing inherently evil about a Wii game-jukebox. I like only having to bring a hard drive the size of a cigarette box rather than a binder full of discs when I travel.